The present invention relates to seismic exploration, and particularly to a method and system for removing the effect of the source wavelet from seismic data.
The problem of removing the effect of the source wavelet from seismic data continues to be a thriving and controversial topic in the seismic exploration industry. Wavelet deconvolution methods tend to divide into two types: deterministic and statistical. In deterministic deconvolution, the source wavelet to be removed from the data is obtained either from direct measurement or from some model of the source. In statistical deconvolution, the source wavelet is inferred from the data itself by using a statistical model of the earth. Because of the lack of general applicability of the statistical model, many workers find the deterministic approach to be the fundamentally more appealing of the two. The statistical method does, however, offer the possibility of correcting for filtering effects of the earth that are difficult to account for in a deterministic method. Nevertheless, deterministic deconvolution techniques make fewer assumptions and, for the more modest task of correcting for just for source waveform, have a sounder physical basis than do statistical methods.
An object of the present invention is to provide an approach to wavelet deconvolution which, while deterministic in nature, derives its information solely from the data.